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Video:Headers and Footers in Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets

with
Don Schechter

Headers and footers are useful tools to add to Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Learn how to create and adjust headers and footers, including ones with automatically updated dates and times.See Transcript

Transcript:Headers and Footers in Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets

Hi, I'm Don Schechter for About.com Computing. Today I'll show you how to apply headers and footers to your spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel.

Open an Excel Spreadsheet

To begin, open Microsoft Excel. I'll open a saved spreadsheet.

Decide Header and Footer Purpose

Let's say I want to add headers and footers to my spreadsheet so when I print it, it will already have page numbers and other information. I'll go up to 'View' on the toolbar and choose the 'Header and Footer' option. A dialog box will open and as you can see both the header and footer are blank.

Excel Header and Footer Dropdowns

There are header and footer drop down menus that have some typical things to use either one including page number, page of option if your file is long, a title, and some other useful information.

The footer drop down menu had the same options. You can also click on the custom header or footer buttons. I'll click on 'custom footer.'

Type Text in the Header or Footer

There are three sections where you can type the text you want. The left will automatically left justify your text, the center will center your text and the right side will right justify your text. You can also see buttons above the text boxes that will help you create your footer. There is the page button which will automatically print the page number on each sheet accordingly.

I'll click that and type 'of' and a space. Now I'll click the page of button which will show of how many pages there are total.

Add Date and Time

In the left section, I want to put the date and time. There are buttons for those too. I'll click the date button and a comma and a space. And now I'll click the time button. Both of these will be the current time and date when you place them as either header or footer. Click 'ok' when you re done.

Preview the Excel Header and Footer

Now I can see a small preview of what my footer looks like. I'm happy with that, so now I can click print to print from here or print preview to look at the whole document. That's all you need to create headers and footers.

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